Xbox One Kinect Voice Commands Are Region Locked

What an odd day for the Xbox One. Although the console itself is region-free, Microsoft director of product planning Albert Penello confirmed on NeoGAF that the voice commands for the Xbox One will be region locked.

In response to a question about whether or not one could change the language to English for UI and voice commands for a console set in the German Xbox marketplace, Penello responded with, “Voice is locked to the region. So no, unfortunately.”

It's technically a duplicate story, but the information in this article is much, MUCH more helpful. The other one pretty much just had a link to the NeoGaf post itself and nothing more.

This one, on the other hand, explains what this actually means. For example:

"While it does not mean that you cannot buy an Xbox One outside of your region when it launches worldwide this November 22nd, it does mean that whatever region you buy from will take precedence of language and voice cadence to that region when it comes to voice commands.

When it comes to setting up UI text language, it still appears as though you can enter whatever launch country that supports the language you want. However, if you put up that you speak English the only available countries are the US, UK, New Zealand, Canada, Australia and Ireland."

I personally found that to be really helpful, as it dispels a lot of the concern we might have as to the extent of whatever limitation this presents.

In a nutshell, if you live in the USA, don't import an Xbox One from Japan. It will be setup to understand Japanese.

If you don't understand Japanese then you won't be able to say, "Xbox On" or whatever. Although you could probably teach yourself to say "Xbox On" in Japanese, but my guess is you wouldn't get much farther be able to say things like, "Xbox show me all the movies with Arnold Schwarzenegger" in Japanese, although you may be more talented than I imagine.

"While it does not mean that you cannot buy an Xbox One outside of your region when it launches worldwide this November 22nd, it does mean that whatever region you buy from will take precedence of language and voice cadence to that region when it comes to voice commands. When it comes to setting up UI text language, it still appears as though you can enter whatever launch country that supports the language you want. However, if you put up that you speak English the only available countries are the US, UK, New Zealand, Canada, Australia and Ireland."